A Birthday on the Other Side of the World

On the other side of the world, one of my children is celebrating a birthday without me, and more sadly, without a family.  So today is a bittersweet day for me.  It marks another year we haven't had with our child.  Although this birthday is spent a world apart from each other, I find some peace knowing that we will have many more birthdays to celebrate together, even if not this one. 

Oliver at Five

I asked Oliver last night about how he felt about turning five.

"Awesome!" he said.

I asked why.  "Because it sounds exciting," he replied.  Oh, to be a five-year-old again.  Too cute.  I predict five will be an exciting year for Oliver. 

Oliver still likes building with blocks, but is moving on up to one of my favorite childhood toys, Legos.  Our neighbors' daughter recently got into Legos and Oliver has spent many summer afternoons and evenings playing on her porch with her.  Not surprisingly he asked for Legos for his birthday and Chris and I spent an evening (gleefully) looking over all the options on the internet. 

Oliver may finally be mature enough for Legos not just because he has developed the dexterity to manipulate such small pieces, but because his attention span is increasing.  If he's interested in something, he can actually stick with one task for a reasonable amount of time.  For instance, he'll sit at the dining room table and color for a whole half an hour.  And his pictures are becoming more recognizable and more detailed. 

His increased maturity and attention span is becoming useful.  For those who know Thomas the Train, he's becoming Really Useful.  My husband the engineer calls him a "value add."  Oliver may never like helping to pick up his toys, but gosh, he loves being a helper with everything else.  Chris put him to work helping to paint our master bedroom and not only did he love it, but he actually painted a lot of the wall and really well too.  Since Chris gets home from work earlier than I do, he usually starts dinner and Oliver loves to help.  Chris set out the ingredients for guacamole and coached Oliver through the steps, but otherwise, Oliver made it all by himself. 

Oliver can't talk quietly.  No matter how insignificant what he has to tell you is, it always seems like he's yelling.  I'm actually going to talk to the doctor to confirm he doesn't have a hearing problem.  Chris thinks I'm being ridiculous.  He thinks there's nothing wrong with him.  In his opinion, he simply gets his voice from his mom.

As loud as Oliver is when he talks, I'm proud of his seemingly large vocabulary and excellent grammar.  He speaks better English than most adults.  Except that he's picked up one "linguistic filler" overused by the younger generations  - the word "like".  While Oliver can chatter away, I have noticed that when he realizes he has your undivided attention while he tells a story, he suddenly has trouble getting the story out.  He pauses often to think of what he wants to say next and that's where I've recently noticed the word "like" used in ways that make me cringe.  And I cringed even more when I reflected on my own overuse of the word like and realized that as much as he's learning to use good/well and "you and I" versus "you and me" properly, I'm imparting some bad language habits as well. 

Oliver may be turning five and growing up in front of my eyes, but he still likes to sit in my lap to read a book.  I should be thankful that my lap is such a coveted spot and that Oliver and Soren beg to be the one who gets to sit there for the bedtime story.

We're still reading many of the picture books we've been reading for a few years now.  These are books with a couple of lines of text per page and a story line, but also tons of pictures.  We've tried getting him interested in chapter books, but for the most part, he's not interested.  Most of the time when we read books together, Soren is with us, and he quickly loses interest in stories without pictures and once he gets squirrely, Oliver follows suit.  We've had success with simple chapter books, like from the Penny series by Kevin Henkes, but again, these books focus on the pictures and that's still a big draw. 

Oliver can identify individual letters, but hasn't developed a recognition of words yet.  He "reads" books out loud from memorization.  And what a memory he has.  If I skip a word on the page when I'm reading, or inadvertently modify it, Oliver corrects me, and then will not let the issue drop until I acknowledge that I had read the word incorrectly. 

Before I talk about how much my kid loves the outdoors, I'll mention first that he also loves to sit on the couch in front of the TV.  He totally vegges out.  We used to have a lot of behavior problems after too much TV time, but now he's pretty good about accepting whatever limits we put on how much he can watch and will turn the TV or computer off when we ask him to.  And while I have a love-hate relationship with Oliver's love of TV, I admit it has its place.  It buys us some peace and quiet when we need to actually get something done around the house and for a kid who's otherwise so active and creative, why not let him indulge a little?

Because otherwise, Oliver is super active.  He loves being outside.  He likes fishing, tubing and riding on the boat.  He even likes collecting the black walnuts that fall in our yard from the neighbor's tree. His favorite days are when he gets to go to the beach and park and play outside with his neighbor buddy, Paloma, all in one day.  He's usually begging to go to "Shoots and Ladders," the beach at Lebanon Hills Regional Park or the Tamarack Nature Center.  He's finally figured out how to pump his legs on the swing, so lately, he wants to hit up the swings first before anything else at the playground.  The chillier fall weather isn't deterring him.  Even though the lake is now freezing cold, he'll still wade around in it until it's time to go home.  And then he checks to see if Paloma is outside and they play Legos or run around the front sidewalk and neighbors' yards playing the "hot lava game" (still haven't figured out what that is!) and whatever else their imaginations come up with. 

If he isn't playing pretend with Paloma, he's making up stories. Oliver's latest thing at bedtime is to tell make-believe stories.  He wants everyone to tell a story, even Soren, who obliges. 

Oliver's 5th birthday is shaping up to be a good one.  On the docket for the day is spending time with one of his favorite babysitters and Grandma (they're tag-teaming filling in while our au pair is out of town), handing out homemade cookies to his classmates at preschool and then going to ECFE where he'll get to wear a birthday crown.  Again, wouldn't it be great to be five again?

Keep Digging

It's a gorgeous fall day and I spent the morning at the park with the kids.  Oliver found a shovel left behind by another kid and started digging a hole in the sand.

"Where are you digging?" I asked.

"China!" Oliver yelled for everyone to hear.

I remember digging many holes "to China" when I was a kid.  The Jersey shore with its miles of sand was a particularly favorite spot to dig the deepest hole possible.  I actually thought if I could dig deep enough, I'd end up in China.

Wondering if Oliver was simply referencing a popular saying, I asked him why he was digging a hole to China.  He informed me the hole was so he could get his siblings.  He chided Soren for pushing back into the hole because if we want to get them faster, they had to keep digging.

At this point, it feels like digging a hole to China will get me to my kids faster than waiting for a bunch of paperwork to be shuffled around.  We first saw our children's faces in mid-May.  We would have submitted our request to adopt them right away, except we had to wait for our dossier to transfer to our new agency.  It took six weeks for a simple process that involved our old agency and our new agency each sending a single letter to the CCCWA and for the CCCWA to go into their system and assign our file to the new agency.  That finally happened on June 24.  I was relieved that we were finally starting the wait towards approval by China, since that take anywhere from 60-90 days (or more).  Of course three weeks later we learned that we had to do a "mini dossier" since were are adopting two children and that took two months to complete.  We were back in a holding pattern with no chance of being approved by China until they received the additional duplicate dossier documents.    

The mini dossier finally went to China on September 5.  Clinging to hope that maybe we'd get a miraculously quick approval, (it has happened, especially for families like ours who've been waiting a long time) I called our agency for an update.  Our case worker confirmed that our mini dossier had arrived and had been logged in on September 19.  But otherwise, there was nothing to report.  She had no way to know when we'd get approval, or even how close we were to being reviewed.  That was depressing to hear.  The clock on that average 60-90-day wait didn't start ticking until September 19.  In our agency's eyes, we've only been waiting for approval since September 19, so nine days as of today.  By my calculation, we've been waiting for approval since June 24, or 96 days.  In my heart, we've been waiting a heck of a lot longer.

And that leads me back to the hole my kids were digging at Mattocks Park.  There's a hole by the artificial tree.  And the shovel my kids abandoned when we headed home for lunch might still be there.  If so, would you mind removing a couple shovel fulls of sand for me?

Mandarin Lessons

It's week two of Mandarin lessons.  Since we're not flying to China until January at the earliest, I'm keeping myself occupied the next couple of months with language lessons.  I'm having fun in the class, but don't think we can go ahead and cancel the translators for our time in China.  As a native English-speaker, I will say what shouldn't come as a surprise - Chinese is hard!  We've spent the first two classes practicing the pronunciation of Mandarin's 21 consonant and 39 vowel sounds. So many of the sounds sounded exactly the same to my untrained ear.  Eventually we moved on to tones -  five of them.  The same word in Mandarin can have multiple meanings depending upon where you apply the intonation.  If you apply the accent incorrectly on the "a" in ma, you'll end up saying "horse" instead of "mom."  People assume that because I like languages, I must be good at them. The reality is that no matter how hard I try, there's a good chance that when I meet our kids for the first time, I'll introduce myself as "horse"!

Despite the challenges I face while learning Mandarin, I feel it's important to at least try.  Mandarin is my children's first language and even if all I accomplish is learning a couple of phrases, it's a connection to the language they spoke before they came into our family.  China, it's culture and it's language are now forever connected to my family and me.  When I was in school, I was so excited when I could finally take German because it was the language of my ancestors. If we weren't about to become a Chinese-American family, I admit that I would never have decided to sign up for Chinese lessons.  But the same curiosity and yearning for connection that once lead me to learn German now leads me to Chinese.

There's a practical motivation too.  Our kids will learn English eventually.  But even if "eventually" is pretty quick for little kids, there will be a period where my own children and I don't speak the same language.  Can you imagine that?  I have trouble wrapping my brain around that reality, even if other adoptive parents have told me that language barriers with their children were the least of their concerns while in China.  Yet they have also told me that knowing even basic Mandarin can go a long way in facilitating communication.

Of the dozen students in my class, only two of us are learning Mandarin because we'll actually need to use it.  When I explained during introductions on the first day why I wanted to learn Mandarin, my story got a lot of attention.  Then the guy next to me explained that his girlfriend's parents are coming to visit from China for the first time this summer.  They don't speak English and he wants to make a good impression.  I decided the stakes are a lot higher for him!

Cannon Valley Trail

A weather report full of rain and cloudy skies that looked reminiscent of our wedding day six years ago actually turned in our favor into a spectacular fall weekend of blue skies, low humidity and temperatures that were just warm enough in the day to enjoy outdoor activities, but cool enough in the evening to remind you that it indeed was fall.  It was with this weather backdrop that we finally took advantage  of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's gift of a night away at a bed and breakfast while they hosted a sleepover for our kids.  Although scheduling conflicts prevented us from going away during the summer as planned, our weekend away ended up coinciding perfectly with Chris's birthday last Friday and our sixth wedding anniversary the next day.

We most looked forward to biking the Cannon Valley Trail, but the bed and breakfast Andy and Danielle booked for us ended up being the highlight of the weekend.

The Cannon Valley Trail stretches 20 miles from Cannon River to Red Wing in southeastern Minnesota and is a paved bike trail following the route of a former rail line.  Besides being paved, these "rails to trails' routes tend to be rather flat, which is perfect for the kind of leisurely weekend biking I prefer. 

Chris dropped me off in Cannon River at lunch time where I lingered over a newspaper and my lunch at a diner and then tooled around town on my bike while he drove to the end of the trail in Red Wing and biked back to meet me.  Yup, 20 miles back.  But those were 20 miles he got to ride as fast as he wanted to without having to wait up for someone like me who wanted to stop and take a picture every mile.

Once Chris and I met up, we started our ride back towards Red Wing. The trail passed through forests and meadows and past farms and the namesake river, a shallow waterway perfect for canoeing or kayaking.  It was a very enjoyable ride and then I hit a wall around mile 15.  I was sore from sitting on a bike seat and actually quite sore before I even started thanks to the weightlifting class I had done at the Y the day before.  I thought back to the MS 150 bike ride Chris and I had ridden together before we married.  I think the first rest stop was around mile 15 and I remember thinking I would have been satisfied if it had been called the MS 15.  Because I was pretty much done.  And I had 60 more miles to bike.  And 75 more the next day.  I have no idea how I did it.  Thankful that I only had five more miles to go on the Cannon Valley Trail and then I would sleep on a king-size feather bed that night, (and not a tent on the grounds of a casino like I had at the midway point of the MS 150) I enjoyed the last miles of the trail even though I was tired.

Once at the end of the trail, we drove into historic downtown Red Wing and then a few miles south to the Round Barn Farm B & B.  This 35-acre former dairy farm with its restored round barn, replica farmhouse, endearing innkeepers and sourdough bread baked in a backyard brick oven captured a place in my heart that was completely unexpected.  I really fell in love with the place.

When we pulled in, we thought we'd pop in, grab our key and escape to our room to change and head out to dinner.  The innkeepers Robin and Elaine greeted us with enthusiastic welcomes and friendly orders to follow them on a tour of the house and we obliged.  This couple was a hoot, I tell you.  They didn't just tell a story, they acted out the story.   By the time we made it to our room, we'd learned about the incredible attention to detail that went into constructing a replica 1861-era farm manor house, marveled at the antiques filling the house, eaten homemade cookies and taken a restaurant recommendation for the perfect anniversary dinner overlooking the shores of Lake Pepin.  We were escorted to the "Hearts and Flowers Suite," (in my limited experiences with bed and breakfasts, they all seem to have themed rooms) which we discovered had a pink, heart-shaped jacuzzi.  Just as quirky as the innkeepers who had designed the place themselves. 

Believe it or not, this is not the first time I stayed in a place with a heart-shaped tub.  My seventh grade class went on a retreat to the Pocono Mountains and stayed at a former honeymoon resort.  The bedrooms had been retrofitted with bunk beds, but the heart-shaped tubs remained, much to the astonishment of my sheltered seventh grade self.

Before our innkeepers said goodnight, they announced that breakfast would be served at 8:30 a.m. and if we wanted to help bake bread, we should meet outside by the brick oven at 7:30 a.m. sharp.  I jumped at the opportunity to bake without being responsible for prep or cleanup.  Chris chose the extra hour of sleep.

When the others guests and I met outside the next morning, prepared dough was waiting for us in bread forms.  Robin provided us with tidbits of bread-baking history as we formed our dough, marked the top with a personalized design so we'd known which loaf was ours, and then one-by-one used a long bread paddle and placed the bread forms in the oven. 

Robin, the innkeeper and master break baker

Since I work in housing finance, I tried carving a house on the top of my bread for my "trademark."  When the bread rose and split, I ended up with an upside down house!

Our finished product.  Yes, there was a guy named Otto in our group.

I passed the time while the bread was baking walking around the grounds and taking photos of the barn.  At 8:30 sharp the guests and the innkeeper came together for a three-course breakfast.  Of course they served the bread we had just baked.  Perhaps I'm partial, but the sourdough bread was the best I've tasted. 

Sadly, Robin and Elaine have put the bed and breakfast on the market.  They're my parent's age and ready to retire from what is their post-retirement job.  I had just discovered this gem in southern Minnesota and its future is limited.  The buildings will still be there and the property will most likely still host guests, but as a wedding venue instead of a bed and breakfast. But the B&B will no longer have its story-telling innkeepers who brought 100 years of history back to life.

Renovation Update and a Birthday Shout-Out

This is a renovation update and birthday shout-out all rolled up in one.  My dear husband turns 32 today.  And he'll probably spend it working on the house.  As we push into week 10 of our house renovation, I'm reminded how lucky I am to have married a guy with construction skills and a drive to put in the work.  To cut down renovation costs, Chris has tackled some of the work on his own.  Like ripping down all the siding on our two-story house. 

The job was harder than it sounds because we discovered the original wood siding underneath the metal siding.  The newer siding came off reasonably easily, but they then had to go back and pull out every single nail.  And once the siding was down, they had to haul it to the dumpster in our backyard.  It took Chris, and my equally hard-working brother-in-law and father-in-law an entire dirty and sweaty weekend to finish the job. Well, everything except the very, very top.  As much as I admire Chris for his fearlessness to climb this ladder to pull the siding down, I admire him more for accepting they've climbed as high as they safely could.

For Chris's 33rd year of life, I'm tempted to wish him the completion of all house projects because he's worked so hard.  But that's not Chris.  He's the type of guy who's always gotta have a project.  So instead I'll say that I hope his 33rd year is blessed with a (small) project (or two).  Or at least one that doesn't have him hanging from a ladder.  

MDTC

We're "MDTC".  In a process full of acronyms, I totally made that one up.  It stands for "Mini Dossier to China," which is a play on the DTC (Dossier to China) acronym that marks the departure to China a set of documents that took months to compile. Nearly two months after learning that we would need to submit something called a "mini dossier" or a "dossier copy," that mini pile of papers is most likely sitting on a FedEx plane as I write this.

I'm relieved, but still feeling a bit pessimistic about all the hopes we have to jump through.  Yes, we have an important step behind us and we're finally back in the official wait for approval from the Chinese government, but this process can be draining.  I want to celebrate what should be a weight off my shoulders, but I already feel myself bracing for the next surprise. 

First Day of Kindergarten

School started today and for a couple of Oliver's pals, it was the first day of kindergarten.  Many of these kids Oliver met as babies when us moms were frazzled new parents who couldn't yet picture our helpless little infants being big enough to head off to school.  Heck, we were just hoping our babies would eventually learn to hold their heads up and roll over.  But those babies really did grow up into walking, talking (and back-talking) little kids. Five years later, some are off to kindergarten and the rest, like Oliver, are waiting a year, depending upon which side of the September 1 cut-off date their birthdays fall.

Despite how bittersweet it is to see half the group I've watched grow up be year permanently ahead of Oliver in school, I'm confident in our decision not to push him ahead.  With a September 29 birthday, I'm actually relieved Oliver was born solidly on the other side of the cut-off, because it took the pressure off us to make a decision about whether to hold him back or have him be the youngest (and smallest) in his class.  Instead, we're putting him in the grade he's supposed to be in according to his birthday and the cut-off date.  If we had wanted to send him to kindergarten this year, we would have had to petition the school district, had him tested and then accepted a placement in whatever school had an opening.  With the good elementary schools over-subscribed in our district, it wasn't an option we gave more than a passing thought.

If Oliver had been born before September 1, we probably would have held him back, but it's a lot harder to feel confident in your decision when you watch your friends send their summer birthday kids (and your son's friends) off to school.  Ultimately, though, Chris and I would rather have our children be a little older for their grade and have an extra year to mature and grow than have our children be on the younger side and have the possibility of constantly playing catch-up socially.